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Tuesday, June 27, 2017

I sometimes think the best way to stay healthy is to avoid being sick. I mean, besides the obvious, there seem to be complications from getting treatment. My father goes to the hospital for pneumonia. While there, he chokes on a sandwich. He recovers from that and gets discharged. But he was given some sort of drug that causes internal bleeding and he has to go back to the hospital to fix that. That was cured and he was discharged again, only now he has to go back to the hospital because he got bed sores during his stay that aren't healing right.

Official

Jakandor, Land of Legend - As if late 2e era TSR didn't have enough settings to support, so they decided to put out a series of mini settings. Jakandor was one of these and this is the 3rd book for it. 146 pages, $7.99

Sea of Blood - Last of a trilogy of modules about sahuagin. $4.99 and 64 pages

The Sylvan Veil - Otherwise known as leaves. I guess. 112 pages and $9.99. Some Dragonlance thingie about wood elves

Adventures

Blue Crystal Mine - Creation's Edge starts up a new series of S&W modules with this, for 1-3 levels. 11 pages, $1.50

Broken God's Pain - Like when Thor drops his hammer on his toe. Apparently a conversion of an older adventure to Labyrinth Lord, but I have no idea what the original adventure was for. $6 and 81 pages and for low levels.

Metamorphosis Alpha: Epsilon City - Huge sourcebook for MA from Goodman Games, detailing the largest city about the ship. Essentially turning MA into a small scale Gamma World, I guess. 348 pages and $25

Misc

Castle Oldskull: The Oldskull Necronomicon I - I'm not sure what this is, the description if vague, but his previous products were largely random gibberish tables formatted so they take up about 5x the pages they should. $4.99 and 246 pages

Friday Freebie 6-23-17 - This looks like a very old school (diagonal corridors) tomb complex. $1 for the enhanced version.

Legends of Krshal - For Towers of Krshal, which I believe was a skethcy megadungeon, comes this supplemental book. 46 pages, $4.50

Friday, June 23, 2017

The Nevermore Mines is an adventure module from The Merciless Merchants for the AD&D 2e retroclone For Gold & Glory,
meant for characters 4th to 7th level. Unlike a lot of OSR projects
that are single person efforts, it's actually done by a number of
people, written by Jon Bertani with Aaron Fairbrook and Mark McAllister,
who also do maps and editing respectively. An OSR product with
editing? Who'd have thought. It's 56 pages and ordinarily goes for $5.95
in PDF, but I got it on sale for only $3.

It's meant to be a
Halloween themed module, or at least inspired by it. The basic premise
is that ages ago, some dwarves imprisoned an ancient evil in some mines,
which they then abandoned. Then humans came along and re-opened the
mines, including breaking open the sealed "Do Not Open" area and of
course, the ancient evil ran amok. But they eventually realized their
mistake and re-imprisoned the ancient evil. Only they didn't do as good a
job of it as the dwarves and the ancient evil can get loose every
"Harvest Moon". And he does, not just committing atrocities, but
recruiting evil followers that can harass the nearby town year round.

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Medieval Fantasy City Generator it is called. Not perfect by any means (and I would argue that medieval and fantasy cannot exist together as medieval Europe required several specific things to exist which don't in fantasy worlds), but works very quickly

Saturday, June 17, 2017

That's one of the annoying things about publishers who use DTPRG's feature to put a higher list price, then put a lower real price just to make it seem like they are giving you a big discount. Because when they actually do give a discount, you aren't sure how much the actual discount is.

Friday, June 16, 2017

Dungeon of the Selenian Conclave
is the second module from Starlight Games and Alessandro Dellamotta.
Like the first, it's meant for B/X. While his earlier effort was for
low-mid levels (4th or so), this is intended for 1st and 2nd level
characters.

The premise is somewhat similar to Arsenal of the Warrior Princess,
his first module, in that the party explores an abandoned wizardrly
research facility. In this case though, rather than being for weapons
research, it's research meant to enable travel to the Moon. While this
is generally possible with a simple teleport spell in most settings,
apparently not the author's. (I don't know about the Mystara moon,
though I do remember that's where the Immortals had their city. It also
has a second, invisible moon full of Japanese cat people).

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

This has been a much better week than last, my father is out of intensive care and should be out of the hospital tomorrow. He needs to get some physical therapy to walk, since he's been bedridden for basically a month.

And we've got a couple of high profile releases. A new Gamma World inspired game and a new Advanced Adventure!

Official

Comanthyr: Empire of the Elves - Sourcebook about an elven country in the Forgotten Realms. Apparently in Ed Greenwoods it was originally called Keeblerville. 160 pages, $9.99

Adventures

Advanced Adventures #35: The Desert Shrine of the Sightless Sisters - New OSRIC/1e adventure from Keith Sloan, whose Witch Mounds I (and my players) really, really loved. This seems quite a bit darker though, about a cult that kidnaps girls, cuts out their tongue and eyes and turns them into brainwashed soldiers that the PCs must presumably kill. For level 5-8. 12 pages, $7

The Storm of Yizhao - Adventure for Godbound. Comes with epub and mobi versions as well. $4.99 and 74 pages.

Rules

Mutant Bastards - Adventures in the New West - Inpsired by Gamma World and AD&D 2e comes Mustant Bastards. It seems to have something of a wild west theme as well, reminding me of Deadlands Hell on Earth. 155 pages and a very reasonable $5.75

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

I think the worst part of getting old yourself is your parents getting older and having health problems. I spent the night at the hospital waiting room for my father who was in ICU with a combination of a heart problem and pneumonia.

For Duty & Deity - Sounds like a sourcebook but is actually a Forgotten Realms adventure seemingly involving rescuing a god from the Abyss. 48 pages, $4.99

The Star Cairns - 2e Greyhawk module by Sean Reynolds, who I still have a strong dislike for from his days as TSR's guy that harassed people who had D&D fan material online. it might be decent though and it's a dungeon crawl. $4.99 and 48 pages

Adventures

S3 The Way O' the Fae - An actual adventure for OSRIC! Who'd have thought. At $10 for 30 pages, I won't be buying it. Seems to be set set in the land of Faerie and involves a leprechaun.

Personally I never thought having a separate land of Faerie in a D&D setting make sense. Because the D&D basically is a land of Faerie

The Ruined Tower - A mid level adventure for Labyrinth Lord. From Unbalanced Dice Games, who is quietly putting out a lot of stuff. $3, 35 pages.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

I have a tendency to overlook Dragonfoot's modules since I shy away from Dragonsfoot, as like most OSR forums, they are kinda toxic to anything not "their" edition and are remarkably rude to past designers, TSR and other. (Frank Mentzer and that guy who originally made the thief class most notably).

Still it's mostly on a few members that are bad, and they do produce some nice stuff, a good fanzine, and a host of adventure modules, their last being John Turcotte's (aka Gnarley Bones) Mistress of Ghost City, the 4th and final module in his Her Dark Majesty series.

Friday, June 2, 2017

Zounds! By my count, 12 more issues of the sword & planet magazine since the post I made the other day. Well, they started off sword & planet, they gradually moved more towards 1950s sci-fi as they er, reached the 1950s.

Fall 1946 - Dread Flame of M'Tonak by Henry Hasse (who I believe was on the very outskirts of the Lovecraft circle) and a story by Carl JacobiNov 1950 - This issue is getting away from sword & planet and more is cowboys in space. Also a glowing review of Dianetics from James Blish which caused some controversy at the time (and I believed was rebutted by someone in Galaxy Magazine, which they have a full run of at the Internet Arvhice. I don't think that's actually PD though, they aren't real picky)

July 1952 - Has a Philip K Dick story, Beyond Lies the Wub which is pretty funny.

November 1952 - The Conjurer of Venus by someone I've never heard of and a Leigh Brackett story.

About This Site

As a long time D&D fan who was lured back and then disappointed by the 5e announcement, I was thrilled to discover there was a whole bunch of people making products for old school versions of the game, either adventures and sourcebooks, or variations of the old rules.

But there was little in the way of news about new products, other than scattered comments on various message boards and sometimes not even that. So I thought I'd collect all the news I could find, as well as write the occasional review.

If you happen to have any news pertaining to OSR products, drop me a line at trancejeremy at yahoo.com